Cardanit Enterprise for easy team management and improved collaboration

I’m thrilled to let you know that we have released some new enterprise features in Cardanit: share suggestions, user management dashboard and a dedicated plan with tiered discounts. As the product manager, I think it’s the time to review what we've done so far and to outline our future strategy.

How it all started

People put their trust in Cardanit for very interesting and demanding projects. One of our first major achievements was with the Composelector European project, where our technology became the central point of a Business Decision Support System for composite material design. Shortly after that, Cardanit proved its efficiency in the merger between two healthcare companies. After those early achievements, we helped Trieste port to estimate its railway capacity, we modeled how to develop coating materials and we exported BPMN technology to other products within our company.

The common element in all these scenarios is that Cardanit solved a very specific problem for a small group of people. The whole company shared the benefits, but the team carrying out the work was a typical Center of Excellence (CoE). The next milestone is to step out of the CoE and expand Business Process Management company-wise. This is what Canadian did after the above-mentioned merger, but we also have examples in the public sector and in the IT industry.

What happened next

Starting from the feedback received from the mentioned examples, we designed an evolution for Cardanit that supports the transition from a CoE to a broader adoption of process modeling. There are two sides of this challenge for Cardanit. One is to align with the purchase process that a larger adoption usually involves, the other is to help people collaborate better.The introduction of new enterprise features focuses more (but not exclusively) on the first side.

We based our work on some assumptions:

• The person/team responsible for purchasing software is often different from the people/teams using it;
• The purchasing manager/department might not know who needs to use the product, but the line manager of the user would;
• There are people who draw and read process models, and people who usually only read them.

The outcome: Cardanit Enterprise

We designed dedicated roles in Cardanit for these specific actors:

• The “billing admin” is the only one responsible for purchasing enterprise subscriptions and can increase or decrease the number of seats.
• The managers in between purchasers and users are “admins”; they can distribute the purchased subscriptions among employees and decide who needs a “Pro” (full feature) one and who can work with a “Basic” one.

“Pro” subscribers can benefit from all Cardanit features, while users with the free “Basic” subscription have limited editing capabilities, but they can read all the projects shared with them.
The purchasing manager is by default both the “billing admin” and an “admin”. Once they add at least one other admin to the account, they can focus their attention on something else. Each “admin” can invite other people, assign them the “admin” role and/or a “Pro” subscription among the purchased ones. An unlimited number of “Basic” users can enter the enterprise account: their email address will be automatically added to the suggestions when a designer tries to share a project.

Our documentation explains all the details of the “Admin console”, but this animated gif shows that adding and managing users is pretty simple. You can add multiple email addresses at the same time by separating them with a comma. You can decide which users can administer and/or use a Pro subscription as you add them, or you can modify your decision later.

Enterprise plan pricing model

The Enterprise plan comes with a simplification of our pricing model. The old “Go” and “Pro” subscriptions are unified into the “Pro” plan. You can buy as many Enterprise seats as you need; the unit cost decreases in tiers:

• the first 4 subscriptions are 250€/user/year;
• from the 5th to the 49th they cost 200€/user/year;
• each one from the 50th onwards costs 150€/user/year.

Too much math? We provide an easy calculator to help. If you’re the “Billing admin”, you can increase the subscriptions at any time; you can also stop the renewal for a part of them, if that’s what you want. Subscriptions remain active for the paid period in any case).

As mentioned earlier I’m excited to announce this release and we’re looking forward to receiving feedback and suggestions.